The WSU-AAUP chapter has paid close attention to the current budget cut planning process and has been engaged in associated discussions regarding vision, process, and shared governance. We want to convey to you our concerns regarding the budget cutting process. Some of these concerns relate as well to the operation of the university at large.

The responsibility of the faculty is the university curriculum, as is standard practice in universities across the nation. Since many of the budget cut plan elements will impact curriculum, the faculty should have had a wide representation and approval power on the plan and on the final rendition of it. This faculty power should be in place whether the issue in question is attributes of specific courses or policies on establishment, reorganization, and discontinuance of programs, departments, colleges, and larger programs of study.

Planning meetings regarding budgets should be public meetings to the extent of the law, and confidentiality requirements of members of any planning committees should not be made except in the cases demanded by law. ‘Closed meetings’ and broad requirements for confidentiality from committee members stand in the way of shared governance. Information dispersion to faculty and representation from a wide range of faculty voices should be standard practice. On all committees whose decisions potentially affect contingent (non-tenure line) faculty members, contingent faculty should be full members of those bodies in a percentage reflective of their percentage of the university faculty.

In the current round, after a semester of planning and a month after deans’ plans were due, the administration announced its budget plan on Dec. 3 and held a public forum on Dec. 8 on the plan. The administration required, however, that the university community respond to the plan by Dec. 15, only a week and a half after the announcement. Coincidentally, the final plan is also scheduled to be announced on Dec. 15. How is it possible that university community responses will be seriously considered when they can be offered until the same date of the final announcement? This confluence of dates makes more obvious perhaps the overall message of this short response time – that faculty, staff, and student responses were never going to be taken into account in the ‘final’ plan. Likewise, announcing a plan and calling for responses at the end of the semester when faculty and students are deep in preparing, taking, and grading final exams and then departing from campus, is not at all conducive to a real consideration of any plan and well-developed responses. This end-of-semester/vacation timing is a repetitive pattern for major announcements by the administration, even when not driven by state information releases. Announcements of plans need to occur during a regular semester, not at the end of a semester/over break; more lag time is needed between the announcement and the response deadline; and the responses of the university community need to be seriously considered by the administration.

Throughout this round of budget cut planning, ambiguous terms have led to confusion and anxiety in the university community. There has been administrative talk of ‘everything is on the table’ when, in fact, the entire community understands that some programs are more at risk than others. Terms such as ‘reorganization’, ‘realignment’, and ‘restructuring’ have all been used by various levels of administration, but these terms are not clearly or consistently defined, so the university community is left to wonder and worry.

In the case of ‘reorganizations’ of programs (whatever that may be), WSU has no clear policy on what processes and conditions will be used to make decisions regarding tenure track and contingent faculty positions. Faculty as a whole should be defining these processes, including negotiation on moving positions, job responsibilities, retention of resources assigned to faculty, and potential rehirings in the case of terminations.

We urge that you delay the decision and announcement date for the final plan for cuts until the end of January to allow time for more input from the university community and serious administrative consideration of the responses. We ask that in any future deliberations regarding budget reductions, realignments, restructuring, or reorganizations, attention be paid to the requirements of shared governance and transparency. We urge that the university operate within the nationally- recognized guidelines in the AAUP Redbook (http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/policydocs/default.htm).

05 December 2010

Please come to the last general meeting of the WSU-AAUP for the fall semester. The meeting will be held at 4:10 on Wednesday, 8 December, in the Bundy Reading Room in Avery Hall. (We are trying to arrange for videoconferencing to the urban campuses. We will announce the locations as soon as we know them.)

Discussion Items on the Agenda:

Budget cut plans

Processes to be followed during the implementation of any cuts. For example,

what does AAUP propose should happen to faculty if a program is “reorganized” rather than closed.

if contingent faculty are terminated and then ‘hired back’, what should be hiring criteria, etc.?

An accurate definition for administration the breadth of ‘curriulum’, in terms of what faculty should be able to control and/or have a voice in.

Ways to interact with the Senate to act on the faculty’s behalf.

Collective bargaining – should WSU faculty move toward unionization?

Once again, we invite all members of the WSU community. Participation in WSU-AAUP general meetings is not restricted to members of the organization. We would like to talk with all faculty (tenure-line or contingent (instructors, lecturers, clinicial)), students, and anyone else with an interest in the future of WSU.

Welcome

Welcome to the blog for the Washington State Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. We are the officers of the WSU chapter of the American Association of University Professors.

We welcome discussion by all members of the WSU community. The issues we will be addressing here should be of concern to faculty, former faculty, staff and students and potentially the community at large. We ask only that the conversation be civil and on topic.

When a post is unsigned, it is the consensus position of the officers of WSU-AAUP.

When a post is signed, it represents the opinion(s) of the individual signer(s).